The town gets a fair number of tourists in season, but in the middle of December I was the only guest at the inn. The permanent population is thirty-eight thousand, about the same size as it had been when Rush was growing up there. Most of the Limbaughs are still there: Rush’s first cousin, Stephen Jr., a former justice of the Missouri Supreme Court who had recently been appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush; another cousin, Jimmy, who is a local hospital executive; and David, Rush’s only sibling, a commentator and author in his own right who also runs the family law firm. The federal courthouse in town is named for Rush Limbaugh’s grandfather Rush Senior. When the courthouse was dedicated, the mayor referred to the family as “Cape Girardeau royalty.” The local Limbaughs played it down—“Mayor Knudtson is an immigrant from Minnesota,” David Limbaugh told me—but people who imagine Rush Hudson Limbaugh III is a disembodied voice or a rootless vagabond disc jockey are very much mistaken.
The first American Limbaugh, Rush’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Johannes Michael Limbaugh (or “Limbach”), was born in Baden, Germany, in 1737 and immigrated to the colony of Pennsylvania before the Revolution. At least four of Rush’s ancestors—Peter Clubb, Thomas Coppedge, Conrad Hise, and Johannes Mull—are listed in the Patriotic Index of the National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, making Limbaugh himself eligible for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. Not all his ancestors were on the same side. His maternal grandmother, Emma Eisenberg, is very possibly descended from Quartermaster Sergeant Henrich Eisenberg, a Hessian mercenary from Waldeck, taken prisoner by the Colonial forces during the war.
At one of our first meetings, Limbaugh introduced me to his girlfriend, Kathryn Rogers, as a lineal descendent of President John Adams. He seemed vague and not particularly interested in his own genealogy; “somewhere in Germany and then North Carolina I think, before they got to Missouri,” he told me. That’s ancient history; for Rush, the Limbaugh family saga really begins with his grandfather Rush Hudson Limbaugh Senior.
Rush Senior was born and raised on a farm in nearby Bollinger County. He saw his first electric light at the age of twelve, at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. He and his mother traveled to the fair by train on newly laid track.
Before then, St. Louis was three days away by stage coach or twelve hours by boat up the Mississippi. A railroad trip was a novelty in 1904, and the Limbaughs were written up in the local paper.
“I don’t think I’d been away from home more than 15 to 20 miles before,” Rush Senior recalled in his biography,
Rush Hudson Limbaugh and His Times: Reflections on a Life Well Lived.
“I just discovered the world at that time.” Evidently he didn’t care that much for what he discovered; at least he never ventured very far. He learned the law, opened his first office in Cape in 1916, and practiced there until 1994. When he finally retired, at the age of 102, he was the oldest attorney working in the United States.
The practice of law in southeast Missouri in those early days was informal—judges sometimes heard cases on their front porch—and not especially lucrative. Rush Senior furnished his “workshop” with a table, three chairs, a set of the latest
Missouri Revised Statutes
, a typewriter, and a spittoon. In his first year he made less than five hundred dollars; it took him six years to save enough money to buy his first car, a second-hand Dodge.
At the age of forty Rush Senior was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives as an anti-New Deal Republican. The job paid five dollars a day plus roundtrip train fare to Jefferson City, the state capital. He served just one term but stayed active in local politics. In 1936 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention that nominated Alf Landon of Kansas. Landon lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide.
Rush Limbaugh Senior was an honest lawyer and a pillar of the community: He helped start the local hospital. He contributed time and money to the Salvation Army. He was a Boy Scout leader. Generations of townsfolk and country people came to him with their legal and personal problems. Young attorneys saw him as a role model. Quietly but inevitably he became well to do, but he lived modestly. “He was a student of Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption,” says Frank Nickell, the director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University. “Never ostentatious, but people watched him. He had charisma. He was polished, genteel, and sophisticated, a quiet, wise man who inspired a kind of reverence in Cape Girardeau.” Rush III dedicated his second book,
See, I Told You So
, to his grandfather. “You are the Limbaugh America Should Know,” he wrote.
In 1949 a tornado hit Cape Girardeau, killing twenty-two people. The Limbaugh home was badly damaged but the family escaped unharmed. Everyone was in Kennett, Missouri, a hundred miles to the south, on the way to Memphis, attending the wedding of Rush Limbaugh Jr. to Millie Armstrong.
“Millie was right out of the cotton fields,” says Frank Nickell. “She loved animals. She kept a mynah bird in the kitchen. She sang on the radio in Chicago before she was married, but she was the farthest thing from show biz you could imagine. Everybody in town loved Millie. She was a kind, gracious, gentle lady. To the extent that Rush Limbaugh has any gentility, it comes from his mother.”
Frank Kinder, a boyhood friend of Rush and David’s, owns an advertising agency in Cape; his brother Peter is the lieutenant governor of Missouri. Kinder’s mother was Millie Limbaugh’s best friend. “We more or less grew up in each other’s houses,” Frank told me. “We attended the same church. Rush’s father, Big Rush, was my Sunday School teacher. And Millie and my mom sang together in the choir.”
When Frank talks about Millie, his eyes tear up. “She was a wonderful woman, not just to her kids but to all of us,” he says. “Completely down to earth. She bought her clothes at Kmart. On her sixty-fifth birthday, Rush called my mom and asked her to come with Millie to New York. He sent his plane to bring them and got them a private shopper at Bergdorf Goodman. It was funny, really. Millie didn’t have good taste, and she didn’t care at all about fashion, but she and my mom had a great time. Five years later, for her seventieth birthday, Rush flew them both down to Florida. He wanted to give them a spa day but Millie put her foot down there. She said she was willing to shop but massages were just plain pampering.”
Limbaugh sometimes mentions his mother on the show. By all accounts they were close, but it was his father, Rush Junior, who loomed largest in his son’s life. Limbaugh hero-worshipped his father, and he still calls him “the smartest man I ever met.”
Certainly he was the most emphatic. Big Rush, who weighed in around three hundred pounds, was a World War II combat pilot who wore his hair in a crew cut and his opinions about politics (and every other subject) on his sleeve. He was not the community leader his father was, nor was he the best lawyer in the family—he was eclipsed by his cousin Stephen, who became a federal judge. As an attorney Big Rush was best known as a passionate advocate. “Clients love my dad,” David told me. “He would fight for them to the death. Within the bounds of ethics, of course.”
Big Rush Limbaugh was a noted local orator, in demand on patriotic holidays. One of his best-known speeches, on the fathers of the American Revolution, provides an example of the uncompromising attitude and teary-eyed patriotism he bequeathed to his son. Here he is, recounting the story of Abraham Clark, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from New Jersey:
“He gave two sons to the officer corps in the Revolutionary Army. They were captured and sent to that infamous British prison hulk afloat in New York Harbor known as the hell ship
Jersey
, where eleven thousand American captives were to die. The young Clarks were treated with a special brutality because of their father. One was put in solitary and given no food.” The British told Clark that they would spare his sons’ lives if he recanted his support for the Revolution, but despite the fact that the war was almost won, Clark refused, a decision Big Rush lauded. “The utter despair in this man’s heart, the anguish in his very soul, must reach out to each one of us down through two hundred years with his answer: ‘No.’ ”
This is a stirring patriotic sentiment. It thrilled audiences on the Fourth of July. How it affected young Rusty Limbaugh, as Rush was called in those days, and his brother, David, is another question.
Speechifying wasn’t Big Rush’s only activity. He had come back from the war an aviation nut, and he remained one long after he could no longer squeeze his bulk into a cockpit. He played a major role in lobbying for an airport in Cape Girardeau. He also dabbled in investments, including a piece of Cape’s AM radio station KGMO. And he, like Rush Senior, was a figure in the local Republican Party. In 1956 he proudly played host to Vice President Richard M. Nixon on his visit to southeast Missouri.
Rush’s boyhood friends have very vivid memories of Big Rush, who often lectured them on the evils of Communism and liberalism. “We’d go over to his house sometimes just to watch him watch the six o’clock news,” recalls Frank Kinder. “He’d sit in front of the television drinking black cherry pop, eating popcorn, and just railing at the anchormen and the reporters. He’d yell at Dan Rather—‘They’re all typical liberals and Rather’s the worst one in the bunch,’ he’d say—and we’d try to keep him going, you know, ‘Mr. Rush, what do you think about this, Mr. Rush, what do you think about that?’ Sometimes he’d say, ‘Kinder, you’re going to be the first Dutchman on the moon.’ I don’t exactly know what he meant by that, but he was trying to be friendly. I liked him, but he was a harsh taskmaster with his sons.”
Dick Adams was Limbaugh’s close friend and high school debate partner. As a teenager he often found himself at the Limbaugh dinner table in the midst of what he calls “spirited political discussions.”
“Rush’s dad didn’t suffer fools lightly,” Adams says. “He was always very disapproving of Rush’s ambitions to have a career in radio. Rush’s mom was a kind, gentle person, but his dad could be pretty rough. He was not above calling down Rush and David in front of their friends, and when he did it, there was a string of expletives attached. I saw that happen many times.”
“My dad stood out. Sometimes he provoked people who didn’t agree with him to violence,” David Limbaugh told me. “Once, for example, he was in a bar slamming FDR, and a couple guys jumped him and beat him up. I never did ask him the details of that one. But it was a couple guys, not a fair fight. I know that much.”
Adams remembers Rush as a good debater—“he could argue either side of a proposition without missing a beat”—and generally in agreement with his father’s conservative opinions. But I was surprised to learn that Rusty wasn’t really very interested in politics. “The only political sentiment I recall him expressing was after the 1960 presidential election,” Frank Kinder told me. “Rush wrote on a drywall, ‘Kennedy won, darn. Nixon lost, shucks.’” This lack of partisan engagement is a recurring theme in the recollections of Limbaugh’s old friends and colleagues in his early radio career. He was in his midthirties before he began giving strong, consistent voice to his conservative beliefs.
On my first morning in Cape Girardeau I took a drive through the town. “It hasn’t changed at all,” Limbaugh told me later. “Some of the business streets have declined but mostly it looks like it did when I was a kid.” It’s easy to imagine Rush there, driving down Broadway from the river, the Stars and Stripes flapping over the courthouse on the hill, passing the editorial office of the
Southeast Missourian
, a robust, Republican family-owned newspaper still full of ads and local stories and a daily prayer on the editorial page.
Across the street from the
Missourian
is radio station KZIM-960, which carries Rush’s show. An entrepreneur named Oscar Hirsch brought radio to this part of the country in 1924, opening station KFVS. Its inaugural broadcast featured live music by the Pig Meyer Orchestra emanating from the Marquette Hotel, a fine Spanish Revival building that later fell into disuse but has been restored and now houses a fancy continental restaurant.
Cape, like many Midwestern river towns, has maintained an uneasy equilibrium between propriety and pleasure. Sophisticated nightspots like the Marquette Hotel made some local folks uneasy. In the winter of 1926, the Reverend Billy Sunday, the greatest evangelist of Prohibition-era America, came to town for a five-week revival. He raised his own tabernacle and preached against the evils of cards, strong drink, and licentious-ness. “It’s a damnable insult, some of the rigs a lot of fool women are wearing up and down our streets,” the Reverend Sunday thundered. “No man with good rich blood in his veins can look at them with prayer-meeting thoughts.” Sunday drew an estimated 250,000 people over the five weeks, probably more than the total population of southeast Missouri at the time. At the end of the crusade they totaled up the results: 1,319 sinners converted and 1,482 church members reconsecrated. The town fathers pronounced themselves satisfied.
The Great Depression hit Cape, but because of the town’s economic diversity, it got off rather lightly. But World War II was devastating. The sons of southeast Missouri joined up in large numbers. Eighty boys from Cape Girardeau County were killed and many more were wounded. But the sacrifice didn’t dim the area’s patriotism or its fighting spirit. After the war, Cape was, like the rest of Missouri, a bastion of anti-Communism. In 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, a three-hour drive from Cape Girardeau, Winston Churchill delivered his famous warning about the Soviet Iron Curtain falling across Europe. Democratic President Harry Truman, a son of Missouri, took the country to war in Korea, declaring that, “the effort of the evil forces of communism to reach out and dominate the world confronts our Nation and our civilization with the greatest challenge in our history.”